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Wednesday, March 04, 2009

In 2000, John Cole was a Republican. Here are his recollections

Posted by Jill | 7:48 PM

Aside from the fact that John Cole is one of our favorite bloggers, he's also a perfect example of a Republican who was willing to embrace consensus reality, even though it meant everything he knew at the time was wrong. So while conservatives scream that questioning the legitimacy of a president who was installed by the Supreme Court and questioning that of a president who received 54% of the vote and 335 electoral votes are EXACTLY TEH SAME THING, John shares his memories of George W. Bush's first 100 days:

Most of you won’t understand it, but the Republican base was just as convinced the Democrats were screwing them as the Democratic base was convinced the Republicans were stealing the election. Both sides were equally convinced the other was up to no good.

I also remember the aftermath, and I do remember a lot of anger. I remember the “Selected, not Elected” stuff, I remember protests and a sullied inauguration, I remember a lot of anger. People are just pretending if they say there were not a lot of angry people on the left. It was there, and it was real. Democrats who try to deny that today are full of it (and in fairness, I see very few people who deny that there was a lot of anger). I don’t remember it among the mainstream of the minority in Congress- they sort of seemed resigned to the fact that Bush was President and mouthed stuff about working with him.

[snip]

Other than that, the big issue was the tax cuts. Our surplus was going to be too big, and we had to return the money to the people. I remember Alan Greenspan concern trolling the country about too much government ownership of private companies. I know, I know. We got the government ownership of companies anyway, Alan, and this all sounds like the history of an alien universe considering the mess we are in right now. And I remember a lot of Democrats were really opposed to the tax cuts, and called them irresponsible and said they would lead to real financial problems (how did that prediction work out?) and that we had a lot of stuff to pay for (like the national debt). I remember them repeatedly saying it was bad policy and it should be stopped.

But here is what I don’t remember. I don’t remember one single Democrat standing up on national television and loudly proclaiming “I hope George Bush fails.” I simply do not remember it happening at all.

So until Michael Scherer and others can show me the clips or transcripts of Democrats sitting around rooting for Bush and this country to fail, I think he and everyone else defending the Republicans and Limbaugh, who are explicitly stating they want President Obama to fail and stating it at a time of FAR greater consequence than we had in 2001, can quite simply just shut up.

Go read the rest. Because conservatives are great at equivocation of things that really are different. Right here in the comments, we have Barry, who I know is an intelligent fellow who rescues dogs and is, in fact, capable of a coherent and even cordial conversation with people with whom he disagrees, claiming that pointing out that Republicans are a bunch of whiny-ass titty babies who lost the election but are threatening to filibuster all of Obama's judicial nominations if he doesn't nominate whom they tell hiim to when Bill Frist used to threaten the nuclear option on the rare occasions that the Democrats tried to use the filibuster when they were the minority, is trying to silence dissent. I know he knows better, and so do the people who think that reluctantly saying that we might not like Bush but the country was attacked and while he's not much he's all we've got is EXACTLY THE SAME as saying "I want him to fail." Unlike these froth-mouthed dittoheads who constitute today's conservative movement, we are adults who recognize that we don't get our way on everything.

John Cole woke up and realized that everything he knew was wrong, and changed his mind BASED ON NEW INFORMATION. It's just a shame that so many other conservatives are so tethered to their wingnut religion that they simply can't change, no matter what happens.

1 comments

1 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Reality sucks, doesn't it?

3/4/09, 10:26 PM